[OT Humor] "Obviously designed by morons"

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Saturday 02 April 2011 20:28:24 Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Apr 2011 17:42:59 +0100 Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> > For example, will the latest KMail (version 1.13.6) work on
> > top of Trinity desktop?
> 
> I don't use gnome or KDE, yet I have no problems running
> apps from either (at least none of the apps I want to run
> seem to have any problems - I certainly haven't tried
> every app in the world).

I am typing off the top of my head here (ie. I don't know if any of this 
actually applies to KMail), but this could be a concievable hypothetical 
scenario:

* you use environment of your choice (it doesn't even need to be a DE, but 
just a window manager on X, say, WindowMaker)

* you type "yum install kmail" and let it pull in a whole bunch of KDE4 libs 
along as dependencies

* you start kmail and it works as expected

* then you decide to try out Trinity (ie. the old KDE 3.5) --- you type 
(hypothetically) "yum groupinstall trinity" from a 3rd party repo

* yum informs you that some libs from the trinity group conflict with those 
from KDE4, and refuses to install Trinity unless you remove kmail&friends

* you send an e-mail to KDE4 devs asking for help with the conflict, and they 
respond that they don't support backwards-compatibility between KDE4 and 
KDE3.5, as a design decision

* you send an e-mail to Trinity devs asking for help with the conflict, and 
they respond that they cannot change the names of the libs and the API, since 
that would break compatibility with all 3rd party apps that currently do work 
with Trinity

* then you yum remove kmail and its libs, install Trinity and try to compile 
kmail from source against the Trinity libs, just to find out that it refuses to 
compile due to the libs being too old

* you ask on the Fedora mailing list what to do, and get advice on the lines 
of using a chrooted environment, building kmail statically, or some other 
complicated and ugly workaround which is not worth the trouble

As I said, this is a hypothetical situation that one can find oneself in. As 
another, more realistic example, just try to compile any contemporary 
nontrivial piece of software against an old 2.2 kernel. It will fail 
miserably, without even a hope of a possibility to tweak the source to make it 
compile.

I guess that the KDE3.5 situation is not that radical, but nevertheless... ;-)

:-)
Marko